Like Joe McCarthy’s ‘reds under your bed’, the RWNJs got their wearing-white-before Labor Day done during this past weekend.

Unfortunately this occured with casualties in Charlottesville, VA as Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-nazi who drove his car into a crowd of demonstrators. This occurred around counter-demonstrations related to a ‘unite the Right’ rally.

Now James Alex Fields jr. is their current Horst Wessel, a foot-soldier (they disclaim him, but say he met the dress-code so they gave him a shield) for anti-semitism’s National (American) Vanguard, a white nationalist organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Unlike Dyann Roof, he chose as weapon, the analogy no self-respecting gun control advocate wants to use, a muscle car. For some RWNJs, the battle is with some mythical yet pernicious hoard of ‘cultural marxists’.

The trope of “cultural Marxism” has been steadily gaining traction among the broad and diverse entity that is the radical right (although, hating diversity, would baulk at you saying so), where it serves as an umbrella term variously responsible for such un-American and anti-Western ills as atheism, secularism, political correctness, gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, affirmative action, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and, above all, multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, we’re led to believe, is to slowly and stealthily dilute and subvert white, Christian Western culture, thereby opening sovereign nations to rule by a one-world corporate government. Whether that’s by Jews, lizards, or communists isn’t always clear…

The “cultural Marxist” conspiracy has a slippery genealogy through the American right, beginning with its coinage by Lyndon Larouche in the early 1990s (although Hitler had warned of “cultural Bolshevism” during the 1920s).

It passed through various esoteric journals and hard-right think tanks and was picked up by paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan (author of The Death of the West), William S. Lind, and Paul Weyrich, and over the last decade has spread feverishly through the murkier, more hyper-masculinist and libidinally challenged corners of the web.

In whose name does cultural marxism get its cred, and why doesn’t it have a national, regional, cultural organization to join. In that same context, what about … cultural imperialism?

Everything that is social is cultural, whether it is the knowledge communities of scholars, or the vast simulation and representation cultures reproduced and socialized. Villains were needed, and ‘cultural marxists’ came ready-made since they had had little quantitative evidence, much like Austrian economists.

The geniuses on the Right needed to invent a meme that could combine the anti-communism of the Cold War and the typical anti-intellectualism of college drop-out pundits like Limbaugh, Beck, and Carlson.

They need to believe that an “alt-left” exists, even as we mock RWNJs by uttering it. It is its own legitimation crisis just as snowflakes have no ideology. Something is subverting white(sic) culture and it couldn’t be false consciousness or stupidity. Darn that asymmetry of hierarchy and privilege. Darn those Others.

Hence “cultural marxism” emerged as an enemy conspiracy theory to offset the burgeoning ignorance now ensconced in the WH with Bannonism and its Millerist self-loathing tendencies. Bannon’s own RW interests in traditionalism are developments of a particular European origin reflected in a number of conservative religious sects.

…Germany pursued “a European cultural front that gravitates around German culture”. The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels set up the European Union of Writers, “one of Goebbels’s most ambitious projects for Nazi cultural hegemony. Presumably a means of gathering authors from Germany, Italy, and the occupied countries to plan the literary life of the new Europe, the union soon emerged as a vehicle of German cultural imperialism.”[47]

I have written on this topic before, but now it becomes, as undergraduates prepare to be assailed by a continuing structure of educational (symbolic) violence, more crucial that the stupidity of RW memes be addressed.

Entire generations of US undergraduates will have spent their adolescence with full RWNJ media saturation thinking that it’s normal to have a Black President, even if the cheaper motels deliberately exclude non-FoxNews channels in their rooms. Hence white identity is being avant-garde, therefore dope.

The millennial cohort does have as it always has a few in their number whose class/gender/race affiliations make reactionary thought attractive. The years of PBO and a “birther” Trump have fostered some even stranger variations on the discourse of “political correctness”.

Some are arguing for a “alt-left” equivalent to the sanitized “alt-right” that is neo-nazi white supremacy, as if the latter neologism “alt-right”, wasn’t itself a perverse example of RW ‘political correctness’.

Combined with the oddly American puritanical nature of repressed sexuality and religious ideologies it is pretty much the same stuff of prior generations. Darn those DFHs, everybody “virtue signals”. And Nazi social justice is a social justice, regardless. And tiki torches don’t get manufactured in your local WalMart.

Antonio Gramsci, not Julius Evola

It begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above.

Adapting this, later thinkers of the Frankfurt School decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values.

The conspiracy theorists claim that these “cultural Marxists” began to use insidious forms of psychological manipulation to upend the west. Then, when Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America, they had, the story goes, a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.

The studios, desperate to claw back the trust of the American people, turned out a series of propagandist films, I Married a Communist, or I Was A communist for the FBI (which won the 1951 Oscar for Best Documentary).

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios.

There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism.

And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think.

The thing is, hegemony is as American as apple pie, or most anything else. It’s an immigrant. The sooner idiots of any complexion realize it, the sooner the Democratic experiment can resume. Contrast this notion of political warfare with the current WH strategists.

The problem is that no government agency—not the State Department, not the Pentagon, and not the CIA—views political warfare as a core mission. This gap is partially filled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute, entities created during the Reagan administration to promote democracy abroad in an overt manner. But these organizations primarily focus on the procedures of democracy—training activists to conduct campaigns and elections—rather than trying to influence substantively who assumes power. That has rightly allowed them to maintain a neutral reputation but also leaves a yawning gap in the U.S. government’s capabilities…

“Political warfare” may be an alien-sounding concept in 2013, but that is precisely the problem. The United States will never best its rivals and enemies without enhancing its capacity to exert influence in countries whose futures are up for grabs. That this can be done successfully should be clear from the experience of the Cold War, even if there are many differences between the situation then and now. It is high time to rediscover lost skill sets and get to work countering the attempts of various anti-American actors to shape the world—and in particular the Muslim world—in their own image.

It will be difficult to measure the outcome of a political warfare campaign—hard metrics are easier to come by for kinetic targeting than for political-influence operations, which is why American leaders naturally prefer the former to the latter. But U.S. enemies, from Iran to al-Qaeda, work hard and often effectively to shape public opinion with influence operations, not just with the use of force. Unless the United States counters their efforts in kind, it is likely to find the greater Middle East developing in a dangerous direction.

16 Responses to The ‘many sides’, of the RWNJs’ phantom enemies

Joey Salads, the chump wearing the Nazi armband in the article is a wedge that is being driven into the stump of society to cleave it in two. He has a youtube channel and has pranked the alt-right dozens of times with his ‘social experiments.’ Not a nice guy, but not innocent either. His videos are bait for his fans and he makes money when they are viewed. As ‘Tim Pool’ said in his ‘tweet’, Joey is fueling the split by pouring gasoline on the flames.

At least one of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi protesters has been fired. News reports say a man named Cole White was canned by his employer, Top Dog Restaurant, in Berkeley.

Another young man, Peter Cvjetanovic, was photographed during the protest.

The photo went viral and has circled the globe many times since yesterday. He was quickly identified as a college student at the University of Nevada, Reno. Cvjetanovic has been interviewed by several news outlets, where he continued to spew his white supremacist racist views on camera.

As soon as Peter Cvjetanovic was identified as an UNR student, the University President, Dr. Marc Johnson, issued a statement which said, in part:

“Racism and white supremacist movements have a corrosive effect on our society. These movements do not represent our values as a university. We denounce any movement that targets individuals due to the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, political beliefs, sexual orientation, ability/disability, or whether they were born in our country.”

What Cvjetanovic and his compatriots don’t seem to realize, his life has been changed forever. It was changed when he decided to leave Reno, Nevada for Charlottesville. That change was locked in, in about 1/100 second it took a camera shutter to click. Young Mr. Cvjetanovic is going to discover his employment prospects suddenly became limited. If he ever applies for a job requiring a security clearance, he can forget it. His future is assured all right, by something that a college degree cannot fix.

It will never stop seeming weird to me that a human being (even this chump who makes money off this) can wear a nazi armband and not feel ashamed. This cannot be explained to me. If he were forced to wear a nazi armband as punishment for crimes, it would violate the Eighth Amendment for cruel and unusual punishment. He is wearing it without feeling shame. What manner of human is this?

I checked out the Top Dog eatery in Berkeley. They can’t seem to win for losing. They were flooded with negative reviews for employing the supremacist Cole White before they had a chance to fire him. Now they are attacked by 4-chan and neo-Nazi types for firing him.

The company I worked for in Chicago had a supervisor at one of its maintenance facilities who was a Nazi biker who wore horrific tattoos on his upper arms. He was a well liked and was a fair supervisor, treated everyone, including POCs well and was well liked by upper management as he got the job done with no personnel issues. To make it work, management had him wear long sleeve shirts or ace bandages when he wore short sleeves to hide his offensive tats.
One day, he didn’t show up at work. Seems he was arrested as he returned to Illinois from western Kentucky crossing the Ohio River near Paducah. The Illinois State Police had a tip from Kentucky that he had attempted a strong arm robbery at a biker hang out, and was armed. He had a police record in Illinois, and he was not allowed near guns. ISP pulled him over and found rifles and shotguns in the trunk. He was booked, tried and convicted. Fired the same day. No idea what happened to him as he was still in jail when I left there in 2006.Good news was that there was no backlash as it hit the papers, including where he worked.

I am beyond disgusted. Been watching some documentaries on WW1 and WW2. We fought this shit to a standstill in 1945, but it’s not over yet. There was a strong Nazi presence in the US before WW2.

Some folks get in a wad and become afraid when Generals have power, but thank goodness for Smedley Butler. The Koch family and their co-conspirators wanted to overthrow FDR, until General Butler blew the whistle on them. Their descendants have never stopped trying to take over the US government.

Military History Now web site has a twitter account. They have a message for those who protest this is about, “history and heritage.” It is truly amazing how much history can be packed into a three second video.

In defiance of a court order, Trump and members of his staff, including Ivanka, are still blocking people who are the slightest bit critical or ask embarrassing questons. They are under court order that as public officials, the First Amendment’s “Petition Clause” prohibits them from blocking people from commenting in public forums, which includes Twitter. This is especially egregious, so those who have Twitter accounts may wish to accommodate reporter Kurt Eichenwald.

Readers may remember that Mr. Eichenwald suffers from epilepsy, and some troll sent him a message that caused the screen to flash at the frequency which causes seizures. He was very ill for a while.

At any rate, he has a request:

Trump has blocked me. Please tweet this image to him asking "Why wont u condemn the types of people who wrote this? Why do u stay silent?" pic.twitter.com/YA1nEbgcAA

The web hosting site, GoDaddy, has told the supremacist site which posted the despicable item featured by Kurt Eichenwald (above) to hit the road. As of this morning, they were given 24 hours to move or delete their content.

That might present a problem for them. The hacktivist group, Anonymous, has taken over their web site; however, there is a storm of denials which appear to be coming from far right and neo-Nazi supporters. As a result, I have no idea, but do know that Anonymous has the capability of doing what is claimed..

The fact that GoDaddy is dumping their web site is not fake news. That has been verified by multiple news sources. I have mixed feelings about whether the Wayback Machine ought to purge their content. Archive for historical purposes, or simply make it disappear to keep it from being re-used?